The unstoppable expansion of digital technologies and electric mobility has unleashed a global struggle to secure dominance over the essential minerals for manufacturing devices such as mobile phones or electric vehicles. In this scenario of competition for raw materials, the European Union has turned its attention towards Spain, considered one of the geological enclaves with the greatest capacity to reinforce its strategic weight.
The Spanish subsoil has historically housed essential resources that have been decisive for the national economy and that have allowed the extractive industry to reach an annual turnover close to 3.5 billion euros, according to the Ministry for Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge (MITECO). However, the current focus has shifted towards the peninsular west, towards the so-called Variscan Massif: an extensive mining strip that crosses the Peninsula from northern Galicia to southern Andalusia, where indications of minerals with unique magnetic and electronic properties have been identified, although scarce.
"In most cases, those minerals provide us with a specific chemical element, but they are found in very low concentrations on the surface of our planet. Which means, they are difficult to explore and, on many occasions, to exploit," indicates to Europa Press the professor of Crystallography, Mineralogy and Agricultural Chemistry of the University of Seville (US), Joaquín Delgado.
These particularities explain that there is only a reduced number of deposits on the planet susceptible to industrial exploitation, those known as rare earths (REE, for its acronym in English) and critical minerals. "China controls the REE market, hence the interest of other countries, such as the US, in controlling possible resources that may exist outside of China," adds to Europa Press the principal scientist of IGME-CSIC, Susana Timón.
"They are geopolitical tools; whoever has control, has the upper hand," Delgado agrees. The European Commission is very aware of this, as the EU largely depends on extraction and processing carried out outside its borders. An illustrative example: 97% of the magnesium consumed by the EU comes from China and 98% of the borate comes from Turkey, which places Europe in a vulnerable position in the face of possible tensions or supply cuts.
The European Court of Auditors already warned in February that, despite the initiatives launched to correct this dependence, the progress is still insufficient.
Spain, in the center of the race for critical minerals
In this context, Spain emerges as a prominent piece in the new fever for strategic raw materials. It currently concentrates 15% of the world's strontium reserves, stored in an open-pit mine in Granada, and is the only producer of this mineral in Europe, supplying 100% of community consumption, according to MITECO data. Furthermore, it ranks as the second largest copper producer on the continent, with several mines in operation.
Added to this is that in the Iberian Peninsula, 20 of the 34 raw materials that Brussels considers fundamental have been identified and, of these, 17 are cataloged as strategic —among others, lithium, cobalt, nickel, tungsten or wolfram— due to their decisive role in areas such as energy transition, the defense industry or the aerospace sector.
With this potential on the table, the Council of Ministers gave the green light in March to the National Mining Exploration Program (PNEM) 2026-2030, endowed with 182 million euros. "We have abundant resources, fundamental and strategic raw materials, but we want to know how many more we have and if they are extractable," assured the third vice-president of the Government, Sara Aagesen, during an Europa Press Informative Breakfast, where she underlined that hydrogen and minerals could represent in 2050 "80% of the value of international trade in energy and other related products."
In parallel, Brussels presented in 2025 a list of 47 projects aimed at ensuring access to raw materials within European territory. Of these, seven are located in Spain. "The objective is to guarantee that by 2030 extraction, processing, and recycling respectively cover 10%, 40%, and 25% of domestic demand," states Timón.
The projects selected in Spain are El Moto (Ciudad Real), Doade (Orense), Las Navas and P6 Metals (Cáceres), Aguablanca (Badajoz), CirCular (Huelva) and Cobre las Cruces (Seville), all of them in the exploration phase. According to Delgado, these initiatives seek "more accelerated access to financing and that permits are granted with priority". "Not with more ease, because that would be dangerous," he clarifies. However, the mining potential extends beyond this list, with areas of interest in provinces such as Salamanca or in the Sierra Morena.
The commissioning of these operations is not immediate. Timón emphasizes that all chosen projects must adhere to strict technical and economic criteria. They must ensure supply to the EU, be "technically viable within a reasonable timeframe", present "the planned production volumes" and guarantee that their development will be carried out "in a sustainable manner". "They must also demonstrate that their commissioning will show cross-border benefits," he adds.
Along with this, the challenge of environmental sustainability arises, one of the main reasons for social concern, since a good part of the citizenry views mining with distrust due to its polluting impacts.
In numerous regions, residents have organized themselves to demand the protection of the natural environment. Furthermore, platforms have appeared, such as the Iberian Mining Observatory, which compiles documentation about areas where bad practices have been detected by administrations or large companies, problems in public access to project information, or the associated ecological risks.
Recycling of mining waste and recovery of rare earths
Given this panorama, initiatives focused on the utilization of waste accumulated in the 21,673 ponds and dumps existing in Spain, both in use and abandoned, according to the PNEM, gain prominence. "They are alternatives to reduce dependence on the exploitation of deposits," points out Timón, who insists on the technical difficulty of these processes. "In some pilot plants, these elements are successfully separated, but the methods need to be economically profitable for their large-scale viability," he explains.
Delgado is precisely part of the teams working on material recovery. He co-directs, along with also Professor of Crystallography and Mineralogy Antonio Romero Baena, a US research group dedicated to the Restoration of Abandoned Mining Spaces. Its objective is to improve water quality and the environmental state of basins affected by acid drainage, while they carry out a detailed geochemical analysis of these waters to obtain base metals.
"We can manage to recover those chemical elements towards a solid", from which RRE and other critical materials can be extracted, says Delgado. The objective is, therefore, "to give a second useful life to those elements that we look for in other sources to be able to extract them from the mine drainage and give them an industrial utility", he details.
The project is still in an initial phase, focused on validating the fractionation processes of chemical elements, and is being developed in the Río Tinto basin (Huelva), where several mines remain abandoned: "The idea is to place an experimental plant in Peña del Hierro, the most traditional mine."
For Delgado, it is essential "to create a system in which there is a synergy towards society." "Many times mining is always taken as a negative aspect," he explains, while vindicating the role of this activity: "We cannot want to live in a developed society without having mineral resources, and mineral resources are limited, they are not renewable in the short term."